Ranting on Near Term Human Extinction

The Big Newz on the economic front over the last couple of weeks has been the ongoing collapse of various Peripheral Currencies, including but not limited to the Argentinian Peso, the Thai Bhat, the Brazilian Real, the Ruskie Rouble and the Japanese Yen. The last 3 are actually very Big Players of course, so a complete collapse of any of those currencies would wreak havoc in the world of FOREX trading, and market finance in general.

All sorts of shenanigans have been ongoing here at the same time, with at least 4 high level Banksters commiting “suicide”, along with the Argentinian Banking System Archives being destroyed by Fire in a basically fireproof building. Reminds one a little of the collapsing WTC towers taking out all the Enron files.

While we are sure it is a very sad coincidence, on the day when Argentina decrees limits on the FX positions banks can hold and the Argentine Central Bank’s reserves accounting is questioned publically, a massive fire – killing 9 people – has destroyed a warehouse archiving banking system documents. As The Washington Post reports, the fire at the Iron Mountain warehouse (which purportedly had multiple protections against fire, including advanced systems that can detect and quench flames without damaging important documents) took hours to control and the sprawling building appeared to be ruined. The cause of the fire wasn’t immediately clear – though we suggest smelling Fernandez’ hands…

While first print is preliminary and subject to revision, the size of recent discrepancies have no precedent. This suggest that the government may be attempting to manage expectations by temporarily fudging the “estimate ” of reserve numbers (first print) while not compromising “actual” final reported numbers. If this is so, it is a dangerous game to play and one likely to back-fire.

During a balance of payments crisis – as Argentina is undergoing – such manipulation of official statistics (and one so critical for market sentiment) is detrimental to the needed confidence building around the transition in the FX regime.

Boston-based Iron Mountain manages, stores and protects information for more than 156,000 companies and organizations in 36 countries. Its Argentina subsidiary advertises that its facilities have multiple protections against fire, including advanced systems that can detect and quench flames without damaging important documents.

…

“There are cameras in the area, and these videos will be added to the judicial investigation, to clear up the motive of the fire and collapse,” Montenegro told the Diarios y Noticias agency.

You really gotta be naive or more likely BRAIN DEAD to think all this insanity is just COINKIDINK. When FOREX markets collapse, PEOPLE DIE. This is what starts SHOOTING WARS. Currency Collapse in all these countries simultaneously is a prelude to WAR. This is what truly gets World Wars started. In a country that experiences a currency collapse, they can’t get any basic necessities of life. Food doesn’t get imported. The country loses access to International Letters of Credit to guarantee shipping. It has always been obvious to me that the peripheral currencies would Collapse before the Dollar, and this run is going to take out some very big players. Even combined, I do not think the PBoC and Da Fed can funnel enough liquidity fast enough to keep all these currencies floating.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is PANICKED that the global monetary system is on the verge of a Deflationary collapse here.

As matters stand, the next recession will push the Western economic system over the edge into deflation

An exchange store staff shows a Chinese RMB$100 banknote) and a US$100 banknote in Hong Kong

…The ECB’s Mario Draghi talked up the need for a “safety margin” against deflation before Christmas but now seems strangely passive, as if beaten into submission by the Bundesbank. I heard him twice in Davos repeating – woodenly, without conviction – that core inflation is merely back to where it was in 1999 after the Asian crisis and in 2009 after the Lehman crisis, and therefore benign.We are not in remotely comparable circumstances. Those two events were at the outset of a new credit cycle. Right now we are nearly five years into an old cycle – already long in the tooth – and 80pc of the global economy is tightening or cutting stimulus. As matters stand, the next recession will push the Western economic system over the edge into deflation.The US has a slightly bigger buffer, but not much. Growth of M2 money has been slowing even faster than it did in the nine months before the Lehman crash in 2008, but then the Fed no longer pays any attention to such data so it may all too easily repeat the mistake. The Fed is surely courting fate with $10bn of bond tapering each meeting into the teeth of incipient deflation, as Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota keeps warning.Those who think deflation is harmless should listen to the Bank of Japan’s Haruhiko Kuroda, who has lived through 15 years of falling prices. Corporate profits dried up. Investment in technology atrophied. Innovation fizzled out. “It created a very negative mindset in Japan,” he said.Japan had the highest real interest rates in the rich world, leading to a compound interest spiral as the debt burden rose on a base of shrinking nominal GDP.Any such outcome in Europe would send Club Med debt trajectories through the roof. It would doom all hope of halting Europe’s economic decline or reducing mass unemployment before the democracies of the afflicted countries go into seizure. So why are they letting it happen?

Ambrose Muses at the End of this “Why are they Letting it Happen?”

Hey Ambrose! They AREN’T letting it happen! They have been pitching out the Funny Money for 5 years straight now, and it AIN’T working! The CBs are running Outta Ammo!

For those of you not that conversant in how Capital Flows work in the FOREX market, let me try to make a brief explanation for what has been going on here for the last few years.

Da Fed provides basically ZIRP money for the TBTF Banks to do “Investment” with. The PBoC in China does the same thing.

In search of High Yields, this basically Free Money has been sent to do all sorts of Malinvestment in the Emerging Markets.

In the Panic Exit phase, the “Investors” attempt to Jump Ship and exit stage left fast as they can. Sadly for them, there are no BUYERS for the Dogshit they invested in, and prices start dropping on the shit. Their only HOPIUM here is that Da Fed or the PBoC buys the dogshit from them at Par. In fact the PBoC did just buy out some Dogshit Gold Trust to keep that one from going Belly Up into this mess right now, but that basically was chump change compared to the several $Trillion in Dogshit that is over there right now.

What Ambrose would like to see is for the CBs to buy ALL the Dogshit! That would be “doing something”. The CBs may eventually capitulate and try this, but the currency blowback would be enormous. Besides that, the moral hazard in the game is outrageous, and if they do it chances are good that faith is lost in their control of the situation.

So they want to pop the bubble “gradually”, but not everybody is going to cooperate with that. In fact when the Prop Desks sense tightening is coming, they wanna exit stage left before their competitors do.

The rapid outflow of foreign Capital hangs many Locals over there out to dry, and they have to start liquidating other holdings to try and stay solvent and keep their creditors at bay. So Selloff happens on all the major markets Globally, simultaneously.

So far it is not out of control, but how long the PBoC, Da Fed and the ECB can keep a lid on it is an Open Question. They simply do not have leeway left here anymore with their interest rates already so low, the Balance Sheets already off the charts and the Collateral they hold NOW is dogshit. If they heap more dogshit into this pile, “investors” will smell it, and then confidence goes in the CBs.

The result of that? Monetary System Collapse, on the Grand Scale. It hasn’t happened at this level probably since the Fall of the Roman Empire.

There is plenty more from the last couple of weeks on the shit going down here inside the Diner, from the European Markets to the Japanese ones, I’m not going to bother quoting it all in this article. Suffice it to say that markets all over the world have been in turmoil for a good 2 weeks now, and more bizarre stuff occurs each day. Like DEAD BANKSTERS. It’s Raining Pigmen.

So why is it all going down here now? Why won’t Ambrose’s solution of LOTS more Toilet Paper off the Printing Presses of CBs all over the Globe get the economy Kick Started here? Aren’t Central Banks Omipotent? They have UNLIMITED ability to create Money, don’t they?

In a sense they do, in terms of creating credit, which the well connected have virtually unlimited access to as well. What they do not have is unlimited access to resources to buy with the credit they issue. For quite a long time here it seemed like Resources were Unlimited, and during this period the CBs and the Elite cadre of people who control them were pretty close to Omnipotent, determining the direction society took by issuing the most credit to people developing the Industrial Model. To try to simplify and visualize the problem that now exists, I drew a few simple Infographics, starting with the Dawn of Homo Sapiens in the aftermath of the Toba Supervolcanic eruption 75,000 years ago.

All the Ellipses here are not drawn to scale, they just are designed to show the progress here of the World System from the Hunter-Gatherer era through to the Industrial Era.

As we begin here in the post-Toba cleanup years, there are very FEW People, and a world chock FULL of resources. People over time divided up into two classes, the Haves and Have Nots. However, during this early time the number of Have Nots was very small, just about everyone was a Have since all you needed to do to have something was pick some berries or catch some fish. Nobody owned any land, you just set up your Shelters wherever there was some good food to eat and water to drink.

Over time of course, the world packed itself up with H-Gs, since we were a very clever and successful species and could exploit just about any decent environment on the planet. This led to reduced Mobility as various tribes staked out claims to territory, so even though there is still no Individual Land Ownership, you can’t just wander anywhere willy nilly anymore to forage for food. Now if you go hunting on somebody else’s Territory, it starts a little War if the Tribes can’t come to some agreement here on how to share the resources. Still, it is a relatively level playing field as everyone has basically the same weaponry and nobody’s population is that significantly larger than anyone else’s. As a whole, the HS population is still more or less in Homeostasis with what the Earth provides because they compete with each other and nobody is taking more than what is naturally provided in the various ecosystems around the planet.

This Homeostasis comes to an end with two related Inventions, Metallurgy and Agriculture. Folks who are now basically limited to a given area who discover how to grow food crops in an intensive manner on that patch of land begin to Grow in Population Size. The Metallurgy they are using to make Farming Implements and Tools also works well for creating new Hunting Weapons, which become weapons of War also.

As they grow in size, these new Nations become further Stratified in terms of Haves and Have Nots, with the number of Haves beginning to Shrink while the number of Have Nots begins to grow. In fact many of the Have Nots of this period are Explicit Slaves of course.

These newly expanding countries develop a Military Class as well, and because of greater Numbers and Better Weaponry begin to expand and roll over any of the H-Gs surrounding them. These people are either assimilated into the growing system or they are exterminated.

By the end of the Ag Era, just about all the H-Gs are gone, except in the most remote and inaccessible locations not conducive to Agriculture. In place of many H-G Tribes, there are now relatively few large Nation-States pursuing the Ag Paradigm, again all in competition with each other. Now when Wars break out, they are pretty BIG affairs, though still pretty Regional on a global level. The Limits to Growth of this paradigm comes more or less in the late Middle Ages, and between the Plagues and the Wars, 500M or so population is where it is stuck for a while.

Two things change with the Enlightenment. First there is the discovery of the New World with a HUGE new resource base to exploit, and second is discovery of Thermodynamic principles that allow for the exploitation of a new energy source, Fossil Fuels. This begins with Coal and the Steam Engine, but progresses pretty rapidly by Cvilization standards to Oil and the Internal Combustion Engine.

The former Ag Nations which get to this stuff first now have an even BIGGER advantage over non-Industrial nations than Ag societies had over H-Gs. With these new Weapons of War such as Steam Powered Gunboats, it was relatively simple for Matthew Perry to motor over to Japan, shell Nagasaki and Edo for a few days and get the Feudal Lords of Japan to capitulate, and “join the party” so to speak. They actually had no choice in this, it was either join up or be exterminated.

As we progressed through this era, the Population expanded VASTLY as the bottom of the Infographic shows, and the number of Have Nots in the global society vastly Increased, while the number of Haves began shrinking, now to the point where even here in the Have Nation of the FSoA, there are WAY more Have Nots then Haves.

In order to manage this ever expanding system, what was at the beginning a fairly Rudimentary system of Money used for Trade began to grow itself in Size and Complexity. Let’s look at a couple of basic Infographics to see how the Industrial Economy begins to shape itself.

In the beginning, the Economic World of Homo Sapiens is just one big unit of Resources and People. From the POV of Homo Sapiens, all the rest of the creatures on the Earth are just Resources to exploit, be they animals or plants. Agriculture first and Industrialization later dichotomizes this into the People on the one side, the Resources on the other. Industry is the process of taking People and Resources together and creating new products people WANT (rather than really need), and in the process creating a lot of Waste they don’t want and don’t need either.

To bring us back round to present day and the collapse of the Peripheral Currencies of Emerging Markets, you have to get a clear idea of how the financial system organized itself up over time to distribute out “money”, centralize “capital” and make essentially the entire world dependent on its continuing functionality to prevent/delay the collapse of the Industrial system that essentially exploited the resource wealth of the Earth until it was effectively gone.

At left here is a VERY basic diagram of the main Financial Players in the game, some of whom are actual Living People, others which are just abstract concepts or conglomerations of people, so People are at the top of the chart.

People create the Banks, the Money, the Corporations, the Nations and the Derivatives that come out of all this Creative Organization. You might think Money precedes Banks in Creation, but it really doesn’t. Original Banks were storage warehouses for grain, money came after that as a Token to represent credit that allowed you to have access to that grain.

Nations eventually emerged here to be the guarantors, while banks took on the role of issuing the credit. Corporations evolved in the Industrial era as supra-National entities basically controlled by a small portion of the population, the Haves in the first diagram here above. Same folks in control of these Corporations as in control of the Banking System, so for the most part Corporations have had access to Unlimited Credit, while the amount of credit the average J6P could access at any time was extremely limited.

Nation-States also had access to nearly as much Unlimited Credit as Corps did, at least up until recently anyhow. Reason for this is that the Political Leadership of any country could offer up as Collateral all the Resources that country contained, along with Labor Force of that country. Countries of all flavors and locations were over time all subsumed into the same centrally controlled Credit system, which took a couple of World Wars in the Industrial Era to consolidate, though the process has been ongoing since the Fall of the Roman Empire and that Banking system.

Again quite simplified above you will find the current organization as it evolved, with the main markets derived from this system. In it, you see only ONE Central Bank, whereas there are many of them, in fact almost every individual Nation-State has its own CB long as they still issue their own currency and are not part of a currency union like the (gag, spit, puke) Euro. However, despite the fact they have their own CBs and Currencies, all are still tied into the same system, which the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland coordinates. They have been doing this since the end of WWII, originally under the 1st Bretton-Woods agreements, but morphing over time in various ways since to keep the system running.

The main “reserve” currency the BIS uses to do all their accounting is the DOLLAR, so regardless of whether any other country participating in Global Trade have their own CB and their own currency. All these currencies have traded with a generally accepted “range” for the past 30 years or so, with some currency arbitrage in the FOREX market through the period. Interest rates go up and down, currencies get traded back and forth all dependent on which way the people in charge direct the investment capital, through the 3 major markets you see at the bottom of the diagram, the Equity (Stock) Market, the Commodity Market and the Bond Market. Who “Invests” in these markets?

The mythology is there are millions of Small Investors who buy into each of these markets, but it is not that way at all. “Investors” are really mainly the largest TBTF Banks, which you find at the top of the diagram. Actually this also includes other institutional investors like Hedge Funds, Sovereign Wealth Funds and Pension Funds, but these days it is mainly the biggest of the TBTF Banks doing “investment”. AKA, Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Deutche Bank et al. Where do they get their money to Invest in the various flavors of Dogshit available on these markets today? From Depositor Money? Hell no. Depositors don’t have the $Trillions$ necessary these days to levitate markets. They get the money by Borrowing from the Central Banks. Why can they borrow $Billions$ every day while you have trouble getting a Mortgage or Car Loan? Because they have “collateral”, which basically is just paper they bought previously, with you guessed it, loans from the CBs. LOL. This is called “leveraging”. It goes along with other methods of multiplying the money you have to play with, Fractional Reserve is another, Rehypothecation still another. This all adds up to a HUGE Tower of Debt instruments everybody holds, which in theory represent something, but in fact nowadays represent nothing, or very little anyhow relative to the actual size of the tower.

Now to the question at hand, why do we see the Peripheral Currencies hitting the wall here first, and why is it mainly the Emerging Markets that are collapsing first? The reason is who got to be the “Lenders” in the Growth period versus who got to be the borrowers of the Reserve Currency of the Dollar.

The Lenders all came from the place where Industrialization developed first, Germany, England and the FSoA. They got the Ponzi started, and as we all know, the first people in on a Ponzi get really rich, while everyone else gets Hosed. In fact the Federal Reserve here in the FSoA is owned by the Private Cartel of Banks from these countries, including the Bank of Rothschild, JP Morgan Chase and of course Goldman-Sachs. So they have always been able to borrow basically as much as they like to expand the Ponzi, charge a higher rate of interest to everyone they loan money to (all the late entry countries), and collect on the spread over the last Century. A FABULOUS RACKET! In the words of Alfonse Capone

During the Expansionary period of this game, the Credit flowed Free and EZ outward to every dipshit Nation-State under the Sun. Everybody wanted the “Cargo” of Industrialization, and to buy that Cargo, you had to have the Credit issued by the people who were selling the shit.

Voiceover: There have been people living in New Guinea for at least 40,000 years – much longer than on the continents of North and South America. They’re among the most culturally diverse and adaptable people in the world. So why are they so much poorer than modern Americans? The question was put to Diamond bluntly by a man called Yali, whom he met on a beach more than 30 years ago.

Yali Voiceover: Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?

Jared Diamond: Yali’s question really threw me. It seemed so simple and obvious, and I thought it must have a simple and obvious answer, but when he asked me, I had no idea what that answer was.

Yali Voiceover: Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?

Wealth in the Industrial Era demanded access to the Credit necessary to buy Industrial Goods and build Industrial Infrastructure like Power Plants and roads suitable for moving the Heavy Equipment of Industry over. The credit was issued on the Resource base of the WORLD, including the Labor Force of Homo Sapiens in any given neighborhood. Even though the Bankers issuing the credit did not “own” these resources (at least at the beginning), they acquired the ownership of them by two means.

The first and most obvious means was by WAR, or just Intimidation by virtue of superior Firepower. In the case of Japan, Cmdr. Matthew Perry brought his Steam Powered Gunships to Japan, which had been closed to Western Culture from the beginning of the Enlightment during the Feudal period of the Edo era. We covered this progression a while back here on the Diner in the articleMr. Peabody Visits Japan.

Essentially, anybody without the firepower of Industrialization had a Hobson’s Choice. The ONLY realistic choice if you wanted to LIVE was to buy in to the model, borrow the money and live the Industrial Meme. Anyone who did not buy into this was Exterminated. In the case of the Potlatch civilizations of the Pacific Northwest, their whole meme of Economic Distribution through Gifting was made ILLEGAL by the folks with the Guns & Steel.

Potlatch ban

Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act[17] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it “a worse than useless custom” that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to civilized values.[18]

The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was “by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized.”[19] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice. Section 3 of the Act read,

Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the “Potlatch” or the Indian dance known as the “Tamanawas” is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be liable to imprisonment for a term not more than six nor less than two months in any gaol or other place of confinement; and, any Indian or other person who encourages, either directly or indirectly, an Indian or Indians to get up such a festival or dance, or to celebrate the same, or who shall assist in the celebration of same is guilty of a like offence, and shall be liable to the same punishment.[20]

In 1888, the anthropologist Franz Boas described the potlatch ban as a failure:

The second reason for the discontent among the Indians is a law that was passed, some time ago, forbidding the celebrations of festivals. The so-called potlatch of all these tribes hinders the single families from accumulating wealth. It is the great desire of every chief and even of every man to collect a large amount of property, and then to give a great potlatch, a feast in which all is distributed among his friends, and, if possible, among the neighboring tribes. These feasts are so closely connected with the religious ideas of the natives, and regulate their mode of life to such an extent, that the Christian tribes near Victoria have not given them up. Every present received at a potlatch has to be returned at another potlatch, and a man who would not give his feast in due time would be considered as not paying his debts. Therefore the law is not a good one, and can not be enforced without causing general discontent. Besides, the Government is unable to enforce it. The settlements are so numerous, and the Indian agencies so large, that there is nobody to prevent the Indians doing whatsoever they like.[21]

Eventually the potlatch law, as it became known, was amended to be more inclusive and address technicalities that had led to dismissals of prosecutions by the court. Legislation included guests who participated in the ceremony. The indigenous people were too large to police and the law too difficult to enforce. Duncan Campbell Scott convinced Parliament to change the offence from criminal to summary, which meant “the agents, as justice of the peace, could try a case, convict, and sentence”.[22] Even so, except in a few small areas, the law was generally perceived as harsh and untenable. Even the Indian agents employed to enforce the legislation considered it unnecessary to prosecute, convinced instead that the potlatch would diminish as younger, educated, and more “advanced” Indians took over from the older Indians, who clung tenaciously to the custom.[23]

A fairly common meme you read on the Collapse Websites is that “We are All COMPLICIT” in the destruction of the Earth and the Imperialist meme simply because we participate by having Jobs inside it and Paying our Taxes, which in the end go to propping up the Military-Industrial Complex which keeps the whole show rolling. Even inside the Diner this is a powerful meme many buy into:

I do not know of one single person either IRL or IVL who is not in the SLIMY WHORE BIZNESS of DENIAL, denying their own culpability and blaming others. YEAH, DE NILE can fill a BIG BIG VACUUM BAG. Karpatok

Quite correct, K. Makes me think of the concept of “original sin.”

Each one of us has benefitted from the excesses of the Age of Oil, from the Imperial Project, from the export of FSoA economic vitality. (“Low low prices everyday…”) And few of us want to consider the implications of that, or are not interested. Far easier to reach for a bag of Cheetos than to consider alternatives.

Those who are less in denial congregate virtually in blogs like this and discuss how to become less complicit, and what next steps might look like.

In a sense you can say we are complicit, but only in the sense you are complicit if somebody sticks a gun to your head and says, “Do it MY WAY, or HIT THE HIGWAY“. Anybody who did not buy the meme and use the Money and participate in this culture was rendered DEAD, or terrifically impoverished at best. Anybody born into the society either bought the meme or ended up Homeless and labelled as a “Failure”. Become a Pigman yourself, strive to GET RICH inside this culture or you are NOTHING, a less than WORTHLESS Person.

The coercion here doesn’t STOP with the Military end of forcing cultures by the Point of a Gun to Buy In, once you have bought in and taken the LOANS out necessary to ramp up your new Industrial Society full of all the Cargo your population wants (but does not really need), now you are forced by the Legal System constructed around this to buy into ideas like Property Ownership, Taxation and all the rest. Every avenue of trying to take yourself out of this meme is progressively removed. Back in the day, you had Mountain Men like Jeremiah Johnson who walked away from this culture, because at the time there still were places to go not Owned and Controlled by somebody else. Now those mountains and their Forests are owned by Weyerhauser or Ted Turner or some other Corporate Person or Pigman. The land belongs to THEM, according to the LAW. Hell, even the fucking Water falling from the sky as Rain belongs to them! How are you complicit if you CANNOT ESCAPE? Even up here in the Bush of Alaska, you have the Parks Dept. Rangers who will fine you if you don’t have a “license” to hunt or fish. Long as the matrix holds its integrity, you can’t escape it, you can only try to hide inside it and plan for the day it DOES collapse, which it will, because all Ponzis always do.

To conclude here today, we often read that TPTB in charge of the Fiat money system create “Money from Nothing“, but this is not really true. The Something they created the money on was the resource base of the Earth, which they basicall were in control of here in the Industrial era by virtue of Military hegemony. Capitalism was always just a Ponzi which made the initiators of the system Richer than God by exploiting the reosurces of the earth and the rest of the Have Nots populating the planet. The problem they have now is that though they still are in power to issue credit, they have little in the way of real good resources left to issue that credit out on. In reality, these folks are as BK as everyone else, in numerical terms really a lot more BK, since what they hold as “Wealth” mainly are debt instruments that will never, can never pay off.

Peripheral Currencies are the Weakest Link in the Daisy Chain of the Ponzi. As the system implodes, the “Investors” seek to exit these economies, and when they do that those economies lose access to Credit on the FOREX market denominated in Dollars. For the food Importers (many of them), their ability to access food imports at a price their population can afford to buy becomes constrained. Once that happens, Political Turmoil in extremis follows and you work your way in progression to a Failed State. See Syria, Egypt, Greece and soon enough Spain and France too on this Bandwagon. Doesn’t matter whether they can create their own currency or not really, relative to population size they simply do not have resource upon which to issue credit anymore.

In a sort of Magical Thinking paradigm, the Chinese are buying up Gold, under the concept that when the Dollar Collapses, a Gold Backed Renminby can take its place as World Reserve Currency. Problem with this? The Chinese are in bigger resource deficit relative to population size than anybody else in gross numbers, with the possible exception of the Indians. Japanese are in worse situation per capita and by land mass, but it is a smaller population. Assuming the few still left Resource Rich countries will TAKE Chinese Gold for their resources after the Dollar collapses, the Chinese would quickly be divested of all their Gold in the basement safe of the PBoC.

Peripheral Currency Collapse is the Leading Indicator of a collapsing Monetary System overall here. However, once they collapse, the Jenga Puzzle of Derivatives will bring down the Dollar too, and really nothing is out there that can replace it, because the resources aren’t there either. Not for such a large Global Population and certainly not for this population to try and live the lifestyle of Industrial Culture that the FSoA did for these last 200 years or so. This has mostly been burned up now, and floats around the atmosphere as molecules of CO2, exacerbating a climate change and making life ever more difficult to pursue just about everywhere.

So it will get a LOT worse here before it ever gets better, if it ever does. Negotiating this period will be extremely difficult, and there is no guarantee any strategy you try to employ here will work to make it through to the Other Side. On the other hand, no guarantee there will be a complete WIPEOUT of Homo Sapiens either, so if you want to LIVE, you try to come up with the best strategies for doing that, and that is what we do on the Diner and on SUN. It is the challenge of all of history this generation and the next faces. You only have two choices here, try to Survive or Quit and Die first. For the Heliopaths here, we will try to survive, and keep Fingers Crossed that some can make it through the Zero Point. The time of the Terminator has come.

In dramatic contrast with our now socially fragmented and alienated society, as the perfect storm of global-scale collapse processes continue it seems certain that over time people will increasingly find it crucially important to work together in small, mutually supportive groups. For this reason, some readers of this blog may have an interest in this Friendship Agreement, which people can customize for their particular situation. This example Agreement focuses on sharing land between friends and should seem self-explanatory to the reader. Given time and stress, conflict will always occur within groups. The motive for the Agreement involves minimizing conflict to the greatest extent possible and, when it occurs, using the conflict creatively to strengthen the group not weaken it. If anyone would like an M.S. Word copy of this file to customize for their use, I will send you one by email. As always, I remain open to others telling me about any errors they find and making suggestions for improvements.

Comments 84

As a whole, the HS population is still more or less in Homeostasis with what the Earth provides because they compete with each other and nobody is taking more than what is naturally provided in the various ecosystems around the planet.
This Homeostasis comes to an end with two related Inventions,

All the Ellipses here are not drawn to scale, they just are designed to show the progress here of the World System from the Hunter-Gatherer era through to the Industrial Era.
As we begin here in the post-Toba cleanup years, there are very FEW People, and a world chock FULL of resources. People over time divided up into two classes, the Haves and Have Nots. However, during this early time the number of Have Nots was very small, just about everyone was a Have since all you needed to do to have something was pick some berries or catch some fish. Nobody owned any land, you just set up your Shelters wherever there was some good food to eat and water to drink.
Over time of course, the world packed itself up with H-Gs, since we were a very clever and successful species and could exploit just about any decent environment on the planet. This led to reduced Mobility as various tribes staked out claims to territory, so even though there is still no Individual Land Ownership, you can’t just wander anywhere willy nilly anymore to forage for food. Now if you go hunting on somebody else’s Territory, it starts a little War if the Tribes can’t come to some agreement here on how to share the resources.

All of this is complete rubbish.

Not only are your ellipses not drawn to scale, they are so ludicrously disproportionate that they have no relevance at all.

Circa beginning of the Common Era, 2000 years ago, there were only around 300 million humans on the WHOLE PLANET. That’s the present day population of the USA.

That means there was, from what you are calling the ‘dawn’, until that time, PLENTY of space for anyone who wanted to walk away and find some.

If people fought, it was because they wanted to fight over what they considered to be their patch, not because the whole world was packed with H-G’s.

There were no ‘haves’ and ‘have not’s’ until the first city states were established. Those were on a small scale and limited to a very small area of the planet’s surface.

As a rule, as with animals, humans do not fight, if they can avoid it, because it is dangerous, and risks injury or death. Fighting tends to be much to do with ritual and display, rather like modern day sport.

Territoriality did not necessarily reduce mobility. See what happened in Australia. There were agreed routes. Look at the Silk Road, from Europe to China, crossing through scores of different territories. People do trade. The first city in S. America was founded on trade.

“We discuss the new game called the Hunger Gains. In a financialized zero sum world, Housing Gains plus Hunger Pains equals The Hunger Gains. This game is sponsored by China, however, and if they withdraw their sponsorship by dumping their trillion in US Treasuries, a new game called working may have to happen. In the second half, Max interviews Alasdair MacLeod of Goldmoney.com about the redemption of emerging market currencies into the US dollar mirroring pre-WW1 bank runs, except on a global scale. With this ongoing global bank run happening, it is China that is buying up all the gold.”

This could be the point on the roller coaster just after the top when the g forces finally tell your stomach you can’t change where you knew the track was taking you…Down fast.
Best of good fortune to all…

The images get cut off here because it is done as a straight paste from the Diner, which has a different layout schema. If you want to see the way it is SUPPOSED to look, view the article in original form on the Diner

Yup, fucking George Bush all over again, ‘you’re either with us or against us’, mindless Manichaeism, that can’t get beyond the black and white of the chess board, and understand that the world is slightly more complicated than that, and pathetic simplistic on/off right/wrong approaches that come from box ticking exercises will never get any of us anywhere.

Really, this is the reason why NTE is guaranteed, it’s basic American culture, that sees everything as a conflict to be won, the war against… fill in the blank. It has been nature. Now nature is defeated, so we all get to die and become extinct.

Now RE thinks he can have a war against extinction and win. Some people never learn.

Real wars are always proceeded by currency wars. We’ve already been in a global currency war essentially since the global banking ponzi collapsed in 2008.

Similar to the opening decade of the 20th century as the British Empire shitthebed.

A default by the Ukraine would trigger a meltdown of the Russian economy and the Russians have it within their power I believe to tip the EU banking ponzi completely over the edge in retaliation. It’s the Balkans 1914 except with nuclear weapons and power plants and a cutoff of Russian gas to all of Western Europe, something that would send their faux mafia banking economies into heart seizure.

More lofty human horseshit against the backdrop of climate collapse.

It’s like monkeys arguing over who own a turd in the middle of the Road.

A ‘re-group’ after Toba and 75,000 years of blood sweat and tears and this is what we wrought?

Quick, vote the human clowns off the planet, their consciousness really is a lethal mutation.

The private consortium that will manage the decommissioning of Britain’s ageing Magnox nuclear reactors will not be held financially liable if they suffer a major radioactive incident – even if it costs billions of pounds to clear up, it has emerged.

This piece is yet one more which gets something basic totally wrong, and hence is built upon a false foundation. It projects “money” and “economy” back thousands of years, as if the fact that money goes back that far necessarily means that it had the same extensive social role it does now. It didn’t. Up to the emergence of capitalism just a few hundred years ago, only a tiny portion of the population had any involvement wit money, as the vast majority consisted of subsistence farmers who grew, hunted or gathered their basic needs. Only after the mass dispossession, the separation of people from the means of producing their subsistence needs, a process known as The Enclosures, did money relations encompass the lives of most humans. This didn’t even start anywhere till the late medieval period in England. There is nothing natural about money, it is a fetish. Seehttp://www.dailybattle.pair.com/2012/occupy_target_destroy_ruling_money_fetish.shtml

You wrote:
“A ‘re-group’ after Toba and 75,000 years of blood sweat and tears and this is what we wrought?

Quick, vote the human clowns off the planet, their consciousness really is a lethal mutation.”

The first paragraph has the tiny word ‘we’ in there.
I suggest there has never been a real WE. Just a large number of competing ‘us’s.(in the later period to now) They is not the same.

The competing ‘us’s gives rise to what we see in the way of Orwellian “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” as a world social /cultural positioning, and destruction of the living planet in the way of resource extraction ‘ad infinitum’.
But the WE has not really been expressed yet.
The second paragraph, the clowns, not the clowns, the evil clowns!! Do they represent ‘concsiousness’ ?
No to me. Their self interest is what they turn their consciousness to .
Two cents for today.
Cheers.

Real wars are always proceeded by currency wars. We’ve already been in a global currency war essentially since the global banking ponzi collapsed in 2008.

Similar to the opening decade of the 20th century as the British Empire shitthebed.

A default by the Ukraine would trigger a meltdown of the Russian economy and the Russians have it within their power I believe to tip the EU banking ponzi completely over the edge in retaliation. It’s the Balkans 1914 except with nuclear weapons and power plants and a cutoff of Russian gas to all of Western Europe, something that would send their faux mafia banking economies into heart seizure.”

I so wish that people would get over this “THE Ukraine” business. It’s a colonialist term, initiated by the Russian Czarist empire, in order to make Ukraine look like a region, like “the Midwest,” rather than an entity which has its own independent political history, language and culture. Thus the empire also employed the term “little Russians” [Malorussy] to describe Ukrainians. English language usage has scorned the term “The Ukraine” since 1992, i.e. the breakup of the Soviet Union, which was never either Soviet (run by popular councils) or a union.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainians re little Russians, and click on “Ukraine” link there re English usage since 1992.

But if YOU were being different to THEM, you’d not be saying ‘THEIR self interest, etc’ and speaking about ‘them’ as if they are some separate species.

You see, you are hopelessly trapped in your own nonsense.

And just like Robin Datta, you try to use the word ‘consciousness’ in some bizarre idiosyncratic way, that presumably you derive from Adi Da and Hinduism, that has no connection to the meaning that everyone else who speaks English attaches to the word.

If you are going to be true to your own self-less all-inclusive we-ness, then you have to be the bankers and the CEOs and the politicians and the generals and the murderers and the rapists and the child molesters and EVERYBODY.

But you don’t want that, do you. You want to cherry pick all the cute and cuddly and fluffy bits of the world, and all the ‘nice’ people, and have that as your ‘we’.

You want to be ‘the good guy’ and see yourself on the side of the saints, with your God Man. That’s YOUR self-interest at work.

Vicious cycle: amount of warming involved in Arctic ice loss, now amounts to roughly one-quarter of all warming

One of nature’s key defenses against global warming—the reflection of the sun’s rays away from Earth by Arctic sea ice—has fallen victim to… global warming. And according to a study published Monday, the vicious feedback loop is worse than previously thought.

The new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the ability of the Arctic ice to reflect sunlight—known scientifically as albedo—has decreased dramatically since 1979, with the calculations showing the region’s ability to reflect sunlight diminished more than twice what previous studies have shown.

As less of the sun’s rays are reflected back into space, the open ocean absorbs more heat leading to additional ice melt in the region. The problem is both self-feeding and a source of deep concern for scientists and those concerned about climate change.

“That is big – unexpectedly big,” said the study’s lead author Ian Eisenman, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, on the rate of loss. “Arctic sea ice retreat has been an important player in the global warming that we’ve observed during recent decades.”

And Mark Flanner, a climate researcher at the University of Michigan, told the New Scientist that the study “reaffirms that albedo feedback is a powerful amplifier of climate change, maybe even more so than is simulated by the current crop of climate models.”

The report is the first to use satellite measurements dating back to 1979 to gauge decreasing sunlight reflection in the region.

The amount of Arctic warming caused by this phenomenon now amounts to roughly one-quarter of the total warming caused by the greenhouse effect, said the researchers.

Point taken about using the ‘them’ category. I still don’t think that nullifies my general point above though, even if this I is not perfect, the points stand.
One cannot perfect the ‘ego’. Just outshine it.
Hope things are going well for you, and your woods.

“This piece is yet one more which gets something basic totally wrong, and hence is built upon a false foundation. It projects “money” and “economy” back thousands of years, as if the fact that money goes back that far necessarily means that it had the same extensive social role it does now. It didn’t.” -JS

I didn’t really focus on pre-Medici monetary systems in this article, so not really sure where this critique is coming from.

However, the lending of money and the practices of Banking go way back to Biclical times, you of course have the story of Jesus flipping over the Money Changing tables in the Temples. Roman Banking was well established, with loans and debt being issued across the geographic area from Britain to the North to Egypt to the South.

From Wiki:

Rome

The Roman Empire inherited the spirit of capitalism from Greece (Parker).[106] During the time of the Empire, public deposits gradually ceased to be held in temples, and instead were held in private depositories.[108]

The earliest recorded evidence showing banking practices is given by one source as during 325 BC. On account of being in debt, the Plebians were required to borrow money. At that time newly appointed quinqueviri mensarii were commissioned to provide services to those that had security to provide in exchange for money from the public treasury.[144] Another source has the shops of banking of Ancient Rome firstly opening in the public forums during the period 318 to 310 BC.[145]

In early Ancient Rome deposit bankers were known as argentarius and at a later time (from the 2nd century anno domini onward) as nummularius (Andreau 1999 p. 2)[145] or mensarii.[144] The banking-houses were known as Taberae Argentarioe and Mensoe Numularioe.[96]

Bankers operated from either appointment by the government therefore tasked with collecting taxes, or were instead independent and practicing banking for individual ends.[96] Statutes (AD 125/126) of the Empire described “letter fromCaesar to Quietus” show rental monies to be collected from persons using land belonging to a temple and given to the temple treasurer, as decreed by Mettius Modestus governor of Lycia and Pamphylia.[146][147]

Money-lenders would set up their stalls in the middle of enclosed courtyards called macella on a long bench called a bancu, from which the words banco and bank are derived. As a moneychanger, the merchant at the bancu did not so much invest money as merely convert the foreign currency into the only legal tender in Rome – that of the Imperial Mint.[148]

The Roman empire at some time formalized the administrative aspect of banking and instituted greater regulation of financial institutions and financial practices. Charging interest on loans and paying interest on deposits became more highly developed and competitive. The development of Roman banks was limited, however, by the Roman preference for cash transactions. During the reign of the Roman emperor Gallienus (AD 260–268), there was a temporary breakdown of the Roman banking system after the banks rejected the flakes of copper produced by his mints. With the ascent of Christianity, banking became subject to additional restrictions, as the charging of interest was seen as immoral. After the fall of Rome, banking temporarily ended in Europe and was not revived until the time of the crusades.[citation needed]

In the 4th century monopolies existed in Byzantium and in the city of Olbia in Sardinia.[149][150]

Roman Banking was involved in just about all their Wars, and Egypt’s indebtedness to Roman bankers in the time of Cleopatra’s father resulted in all that nonsense with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.

There is no doubt that in the succeeding period begun in the Medici Era, Banking systems and money have become much more powerful and Global, but they have been present since at least the time of the Babylonian Empire, predating Rome by several thousand years.

But I have a problem regarding analysis. In general.
They show only a reduced part of the picture.
I have been collecting this kind of analysis for years. Each one focused in a part of the big problem, us.
And although new analysis add new data, they do not add significant information.
Mostly reinforce, already concluded issues.
And, because the problem is much bigger and complex than what usually, for practical reasons, any analysis can cover, without the required depth, they just show parts of the problem. And with parts of the problem, without the (thousands of) necessary links with other complementary analysis, nothing useful, to take actions, can be concluded.
All of them give a 0.1º view of a full circle.
They are not holistic, and just provide one or two pixels of the picture, so with just a pixel of the picture, there is no way to see the picture.
As IC produces experts on everything, we are getting full of experts making analysis of ever in more detail issues. We are getting to know everything about nothing, as G.Chia said.
Real world, after years and lots of analysis, things are not even getting better. Being practical, they have been mostly useless to stop or at least slow the train.
A pixel is not enough.
Analysis, as is done today, is not enough.
They must be linked to others, to conform an important part of the picture.
We need the general experts, able to link the issues, as Guy McPherson does, although we need many people doing the same. Connecting dots, in all areas. Not just climate and IC.
Besides that, these are, in general wide band-with analysis.
Even focused in some area, they usually are too general to be useful.
For example, I have never seen my country mentioned in any analysis. We are part of the situation, but not relevant to analysts, and certainly we live a different situation, that requires a detailed view.
So, my point is that we do not need more analysis, not anymore.
There are enough of them.
More will not add value to see the whole picture.
They show in a broad way, not practical (too general), what to do, and what not, to change the course.
But we have been running in circles.
Making the mistakes that analysis has showed, once and again.
Again and again.

It is time to change the action,
We need to get useful conclusions out of them.
And by useful I mean, something that will work.
We have to put the parts together, to see a bigger part of the picture.
We have to go beyond of “what to do, and what not”, that has not worked so far.

Maybe it is time to think, and devise, a new society, based in other values.
What so many analysis show, is that our current scheme of society is wrong all the way to the roots.
We need to find the causes, the deep real ones, those related with what is wrong about our nature. Our nature holds the root of the problems. I would not call it the original sin, but it is something that is within ourselves, something that we have to control.
We have been moving inside of a circle that we refuse to break. While we keep on doing things within the limits of that circle, nothing will change.
For example your SUN project is something within the limits of the circle. So it can be expected, and backed by so many analysis of our nature, that it will fail.
As you say in the recorded part, to “continue for a while” makes no sense.
To continue what.
More of the same with a different envelope?

I once asked my mother (now passed away) about what had she done wrong in her life, if she had some lessons to give me about life. And she said “there´s nothing I have done wrong”. I know that she was wrong about that. She made a lot of mistakes, specially regarding our childhood.
She had no willing to take lessons out of her life, lessons that is better to have, instead of dying and taking them to the grave. As she did.
A life in the end with no purpose, living nothing useful to next generations.
And a world full of problems.
A country still suffering the same lack of a life with no purpose.

This is what I see about our IC, not open to real hard-to-accept lessons. Most of the many mistakes, are always caused by others. There are no lessons that the average human will consider for their life and family. The conclusion of always, “I did not make the mistakes, not me. It is somebody else´s fault”.

It seems to me that no big efforts have been done to understand what MUST be changed in our behavior. “Many things” may say somebody, “everything” would say another. But the point is that always we keep thinking in keeping (sort of) the same kind of life.
We have not been able to find a sense for living totally different than what we do today, and at the same time, be durable.
Any proposal, like yours (SUN project), is built from what we are used to, what we have been doing for centuries, a practice that we know is wrong, because it will take us again to where we are today.
All the collapse aftermath are mainly focused in how to restore the same way of living we have today, or had in the past. But in general, more of the same.
The problems are not war, need for power, pollution, and abuse of natural resources (among others). They are consequences of something else. That “something else” is what we need to figure out. Maybe it is the acceptance that we are not more important than an ant. Our values lead us to an unsustainable society. As Al Bartlet once said, all the called “good things” from our society, are bad for our society, like more healthcare, more secure cars, healthy life, better food, etc..
There are thousands of analysis on what we have done, in the gross issues, wrong. But, no will to change. This lack of will crosses the whole pyramid. From bottom to top. Nobody is free of guilt. Me included.
Although I make efforts to find a solution, nothing of what I have seen so far, seems to me that is a solution. They are mostly only forced responses, or remedies, but not solutions.
I have been thinking a lot about this problem, and honestly, seems to me that the solution requires a totally new way to see our life.
We have to change our life from “with no purpose”, as is today, to “with purpose”.
But then, what purpose?.
Consume, our purpose nowadays is by the way, within the circle.
Living to consume is the dead end road, we already know. By analysis.
We have to go beyond Zen, monks and some lessons we can get from ancient tribes, beyond what we today see closer to the basis for a durable life. Because whatever comes from our experience, has not worked so far. Nothing has got the status of “durable”.

And after all this about IC, and mankind in general, then we have to deal with climate change.
Another issue that adds a lot of pixels to the picture, yet to be found.

Economics is just one piece of the Puzzle GA, but a very important piece in the near term to consider. I try to put it in the context of all the rest of the shit going down, but you have to follow the Diner to get all the context. I only send Guy stuff I think he will publish, not everything.

Report from monkey land: Without a doubt, they are the superior beings. They do not poison their habitat or build global death machines. They have not internalized their cages. They have not contained their existence inside a boxed in life in a theater of abstract artifacts and laws and currencies and walls. They have not mirrored themselves in. Humans boxed them, and boxed other humans. Stifled and overcrowded with stiffening restrictions. Deadly life restrictions.

In just a few years all these strange man made objects, covered with dust, will stand as silent sentinels. Rusting cars going nowhere, some with skeletons still at the wheel, evaporated coffee cup on the dashboard with residue evidence. Leaving behind a rutted trail, a testament, a legacy… of barrier obstacles and depletion end points. A series of deadly traps that will continue to kill long after we’re gone.

Meanwhile, there are some who boldly wave glitzy banners of baseless optimistic foolishness, right to the bitter end, leading… funneling, straight to the all inclusive grave. Fanatically believing in the after life, in the impossible fantasy of life after extinction, they exhort fidelity to their ultimate, deceptive, absurd quest. I can think of nothing more misleading and underhanded and unpleasant than faux optimism in the face of fatal danger. It is the worst variety of vapid denialism. A noisy annoying distraction from appropriate and timely, mature introspection. Its time to clear the smoke and break the mirrors and take a good look at ourselves… while we still can.

The monkeys are too smart to bother with all this crap. Too smart to have pooped such poop. I hear one laughing at my low foolishness from the top of her tree. Or is she sobbing in a language a simple human can’t understand?

Assigning a value in symbols (wampum, cowrie shells, disks of metal precious or otherwise, green pictures of dead presidents, charged particles on rust-coated aluminium disks, etc.) affords a handle on everything to those with the symbols. The manipulation and mischief with the symbols constitutes the tertiary economy.

Have you heard about the uncontrolled airborne release of radioactive plutonium from a geological nuclear waste storage facility in New Mexico in 2014? According to SRIC; the radiation leak came from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The leak was identified at 11:30 pm on Friday, February 14, 2014. After the leak was found via an alarm system, it triggered a filtration system, so that air coming out of WIPP would be filtered before being released. Radiation was detected 3,000 feet NW of the ventilation shaft.http://www.sric.org/nuclear/docs/WIPP_Leak_02212014.pdf

According to climateviewer.com, article below, the radioactive plutonium and americium release was hidden from the public by authorities for five days. A local news report confirms that there was a ‘delay’ of several days.

There was also a fire at this same facility about a week earlier that released thick black clouds of smoke out of the ventilation shaft. The cause of this fire was claimed to be nothing more than ‘a vehicle’.

(and)

How is it that the EPA is working with the DOE on this illegal high level nuclear waste project? The EPA is supposed to be protecting the environment, but now it seems to be in charge of an illegal high level nuclear waste facility. The EPA and DOE are now responsible for the release of airborne plutonium and americium, one of the most deadly substances on Earth.

Bottom line, taxpayers are footing the bill for the garbage produced by the for profit, private nuclear industry. High level radioactive liquid waste is now being disposed of illegally in places like WIPP, despite WIPP originally being permitted for only non liquid, low level nuclear waste. [read the rest]

I only last night discovered rocket stoves! Many designs to choose from, dyi or manufactured. I like the one below, but the Grover company rocket stoves appear to be the best if you wanted to spend the money.

Yes Logspirit.
Thanks for putting that so clearly.
“Baseless optimistic foolishness” is so well put and sums up the American dream to me. Most people over here are not so easily infected. Maybe this pursuit of happiness is at the bottom of it: happiness being interpreted as my right to make my personal dreams come true rather than a contentment in a peaceful society.
Just a few thoughts … and I hope you’re well.

Says RE: […] you of course have the story of Jesus flipping over the Money Changing tables in the Temples.

Wouldn’t it be grand to never hear of this again, with or without the idiosyncratic capitalisation?

Because the peripatetic preacher known to us as Jesus of Nazareth did no such thing. It’s myth-making. Anyone who dared make the slightest disturbance in the heavily guarded money exchange would have been promptly flogged to make an example of him and then hauled away to a grim jail cell, with a public execution to look forward to.

You know, all of this is so much BS. It’s worse than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s spending your last minutes analyzing the Titanic engineering specs or the steering dynamics while the engine is fully engaged, stopped, or reversed. It’s thinking about how you will squeeze one last breath out of life as you sink into the freezing cold water.

The village idiot sits idle on a fence without a care, for he does not know he is doomed.

RE Says:
February 23rd, 2014 at 9:46 pm
““This piece is yet one more which gets something basic totally wrong, and hence is built upon a false foundation. It projects “money” and “economy” back thousands of years, as if the fact that money goes back that far necessarily means that it had the same extensive social role it does now. It didn’t.” -JS

I didn’t really focus on pre-Medici monetary systems in this article, so not really sure where this critique is coming from.

However, the lending of money and the practices of Banking go way back to Biclical times, you of course have the story of Jesus flipping over the Money Changing tables in the Temples. Roman Banking was well established, with loans and debt being issued across the geographic area from Britain to the North to Egypt to the South.

From Wiki:……”

RE, it’s obvious you didn’t read the THRUST of what i had to say. I did NOT say that you focus on pre-Medici monetary systems. What i did say was that you treat the present monetary system as a continuation of these older systems, totally failing to see the essential break and DISCONTINUITY between what has happened over the last few centuries and the period before. Banking, markets and money in the pre-capitalist age involved a *tiny minority of the population.* And markets were not today’s competitive situations. You take the existence of money, lending,… in ancient societies as if they occupied the same social roles as they do today. They did NOT. They were marginal phenomena, involving largely only the elites and merchants. Social production as a whole was NOT essentially structured, dominated by the market, monetary relations, or anything of the sort till the advent of capitalism. Lots of details can be read athttp://www.monthlyreview.org/798wood.htm

Well, I for one enjoyed the read. The usual gang is engaged in debates about various details, but the main point appears to be ignored: The US is playing “last man standing”.

Now, to effectively play LMS, participants have to ignore the potential threat that they, too, may not survive. But the crucial idea is the play itself ie the game within the game. For those who refuse, they will soon feel the sting of the lash across their pitiful shoulders, simply because walking away is NOT an option.

So, a reasonable, rationale person evaluating this situation would be expected to conclude that: (a) it’s better to side with the projected winner (um, that would be the US); (b) it does no good complaining about how it’s not fair, it’s immoral, ad infinitum. Yeah, I get it – I’m fucking evil.

Here’s the real deal: the US has been locked into a wartime economy since 1941. Off & on we scale the level of engagement, or manage the message, but the essential nature remains unchanged. Wartime spending has been a reliable foundation for the Ponzi, as it both creates its own demand, and consistently returns positive dividends in the form of resources, booty, etc.

However, diminishing returns is setting up the next stage, which is where I think it begins to get interesting: when the sheep find out the truth of the situation. This is going to represent a huge emerging market, with hard to predict demand for goods and services as the iron heel begins to grind.

But, the core nature of the program will be unchanged: wage/price controls & rationing. Allegiance will naturally be demanded, because it truly is going to be a situation where “you’re either for us or against us”.

Ultimately, our homegrown propaganda masters are going to have to craft a message where the volk come to believe that it’s OK for billions of “others” die so that we have a chance to live.

Any doomer worth his salt will be studying these collapsing societies to see which groups fare the best. My guess is it will the usual suspects: warlords, gangs, clans, etc. This should give you a heads up on how to adequately prepare in your neck of the woods as the tide washes ashore even in the USA.

You raise an interesting point about complicity. I believe in a version of karma, where the actions you perform in your life, as well as your intent in performing these actions, determine whether any implicit complicity can be diminished or erased. Integrity and honesty are important here, particularly as it pertains to your resource/carbon/AGW footprint: planting enough trees (or other actions) to offset your carbon footprint is done absolutely honestly is acceptable. This means (for example only) if you own your own private plane, it’s not just offsetting the cost of the jet fuel, but taking the carbon cost of manufacturing the plane into account. The actual judgement about your carbon karma can’t be made until much later: if humans colonise space and use that as a way to get out of this mess (again, as a hypothetical example), then any contribution you make in this regard (space exploration, etc.) would have very good karma. In general, if you die giving more than you’ve taken (taking everything into account), then any negative outcomes you’re complicit in are erased by the positive actions you’ve taken. If everyone in the world gave more than they took, we’d be living in better planet.

PS: The word “homeostasis” is being used as “equlibrium” (an acceptable substitution) and while there’s no formal measurement, it’s an English-language article. So I get the point the author was trying to make. I don’t think being literal is useful for an article such as this.

If we are not supposed to take his words literally, how are we supposed to take them ? Is it allegory ? Poetry ?

Equilibrium defined as ‘A condition in which all acting influences are canceled by others, resulting in a stable, balanced, or unchanging system.’

NOT the same as homeostasis. Anyway, why not just say balance ?

He’s talking about the Earth System. Whether or not there IS such a thing as homeostasis operating is of considerable theoretical interest and quite controversial. Seems to me sloppy to dilute the meaning of the term, and give it a capital H, why ? all over an issue where it’s not obvious that it way applies AT ALL.

And i say Graeber is FUNDAMENTALLY wrong. The article i linked to in my earlier post about Occupy and the money fetish in fact addresses this. So do several articles which can be found at http://libcom.org/ via search under “Graeber.”

@Sabine
Thanks, we all do our part. The fantasy of expectation created by mass media, besides being a driver of consumption for the few who can actually afford crumbling junk, also has other malignant features. It makes nearly everyone else feel like a loser. Many psycho-social problems in industrial ‘civilization’ can be traced to these counterfeit assurances, these dangling pseudo-carrots… including but certainly not limited to: the prevalence of dysfunctional families and work places, rampant unacknowledged alcoholism, and a wide variety and gradient of aggressions that bludgeon quality of life and foster defensibly rational paranoia. The feelings of inferiority which result from minds being marinated in slime mold programming that dredges up hankerings for ‘unobtainium‘ engenders many discomforts and psychoses throughout society. All that layered upon emergent fear of rapidly encroaching poverty.

Of course, worse, there are the absolute conundrums: the plumes of radioactive substances, catastrophic climate change, and the 6th Great Extinction… all caused by, but now beyond, human control.

Further, in such dire circumstances, the mass media sector is under intensified pressure to continue to ramp up and regurgitate the fantasy version of Life on Earth. To spew glossy fictional dream paths in the midst of decline. Creating more vicious cycles of stormy doom.

ulvfugl, yeah, I read the post generally, not too literally (please also read my previous post as “too literal” instead of just “literal”). At least that’s how I read posts like this, where “people”, “resources”, and similar concepts are represented by big ovals. So yeah, you should read his writing generally, not too literally.

Equilibrium and homeostasis are used interchangeably in many situations, even in the scientific literature. He could indeed have just said “balance.” That’s what he meant. That was clear to me, which is why I wrote what I did. If you analyse this essay with that sense of literalism, there are a lot of other issues you can bring up and I think it’s missing the more general point being made.

Indeed, the issue of the earth being a homeostatic system is an interesting concept of ponder. But that’s not the spirit in which this article was written and it was obvious to me. The use of capitalisation and certain phrasing is interesting. The first sentence contains the phrase “Big Newz” and the phrase “Da Fed” is used repeatedly. What do you make of that capitalisation? Like I said, if you really start getting picky like that, there’s a lot of stuff to nitpick.

To get back on topic, did you hear about the Bitcoin exchange in Japan losing track of its Bitcoins? Talk about pyramid schemes…

ulvfugl, I don’t think this is a discussion about homeostasis and equilibrium, but if you look at the Wikipedia’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_types_of_equilibrium, under Biology, the term “Homeostasis” appears. They are used interchangeably when referring to biological systems in many contexts.

I also think focussing on the capitalisation in this particular post is missing the points being made (i.e., missing the forest for the trees). I just did a cursory check of all the words that had their first letters capitalised and I was scratching my head as to why it was done (not to mention the words that had ALL their letters capitalised). When I read this post I certainly glossed over all that.

Yeah, well, for me words have defined meanings. You want to be Humpty Dumpty and have them mean whatever you want them to mean, I can’t stop you.

———–

In addition to the personal attacks on targets, JTRIG also involves the use of psychological and social-science tactics to steer online activism and discourse. The document details GCHQ’s “Human Science Operations Cell,” which focuses on “online human intelligence” and “strategic influence and disruption” that are used to dissect how targets can be manipulated using “leaders,” “trust,” “obedience,” and “compliance.”

West Texas Intermediate Crude at $102.82 per barrel
Brent Crude at $110.62

See how the cookie holds together.

Not knocking the inclusion,but why the ‘rocket stove’ clip here on NBL. Didn’t everyone prep this tech several years ago? This one is not a bad design, but how long will the cement hang together before cracks appear?
Like your life may in part depend on it…?
Just sayin.

“AG: So here’s the bottom line for the cleanup at Fukushima Daiichi. Tokyo Electric doesn’t have the technical expertise to do this job right. Before removing fuel, we should remove Tokyo Electric. The second piece of that, though, is that Tokyo Electric never had the money to do this right. They’re too small to afford a cleanup of this magnitude. The Japanese government’s got to step up and admit that this is a half a trillion dollar problem, and the people in the country of Japan are on the hook to pay for it. There’s not enough assets in Tokyo Electric to ever solve this problem.

The third piece is that international experts have to be brought in. This is too big a problem for any one company to solve. But lastly revolves around you and me. We’ve got to provide citizen oversight to make sure this job is done correctly.

If we leave it to the nuclear priesthood, they’ll circle the wagons and not tell us everything that’s going on there. I’m particularly concerned about the dose that people in Fukushima Prefector are receiving and the health effects that are being presently hidden. Citizen oversight is the key to make the cleanup of Fukushima work. Fairewinds has been a beacon of information in an age when the nuclear priesthood does not want information released. And I know that you appreciate this because you’re watching these videos.

You can help us to continue to be that beacon in the fog in 2014. A donor has stepped forward and has offered us $2 for every dollar that other people give us. That means that your one-dollar donation makes three when it’s matched by this donor. It’s an incredible opportunity. Fairewinds is a non-profit and I hope that you’ll consider a donation so that we can continue to move forward into 2014 with the high quality productions that you’re used to seeing.

The Department of Energy has confirmed the airborne release of Plutonium-239 & Americium-241 from underground nuclear waste storage site near Carlsbad, NM. Body and lung scans are now being conducted for everyone within 100 miles of the site, yet nuclear proponents insist, as usual, there’e no threat to public health or safety and the military nuclear facility has been shuttered. [yeah sure – that’s what they said about Fukushima]

“We are wondering why it took a couple of days to confirm the radiological event outside of the underground,” said Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn. “We will demand that federal officials share information with the public in real time. That’s the reason we are here.”

Known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the facility is the nation’s only licensed deep geological nuclear waste repository. Approximately 26 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, the facility is the nation’s so-called solution for permanent disposal of the Department of Energy’s cold war legacy transuranic waste that has been stored at 23 former nuclear-weapons-complex and generation sites located across 13 states.

[video included]

The term transuranic refers to artificially made radioactive elements, such as neptunium, plutonium, americium, and others, with atomic numbers higher than uranium in the periodic table of elements.

None of those elements are stable and each decays radioactively into other elements.

The event began late on Feb. 15 when air monitors detected elevated radiation levels in the plants underground storage complex located more than 2000 feet beneath the surface. No employees were working underground at the time and those on the surface sheltered in place as a precaution.

Operations at the facility have been halted and workers have been unable reenter the underground storage complex due to high radiation levels.

On Wednesday, tests by the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center, a division of the College of Engineering at New Mexico State University, showed the presence americium and plutonium on at least one air filter retrieved from a sampling station located a half mile from the from the WIPP site.

Normally the filters are retrieved on a daily basis. Given the original incident the previous Friday, the filters had not been retrieved for testing in 5 days.

It is highly disturbing that the Department of Energy waited several days before notifying New Mexico state officials about the airborne release.

According to Russell Hardy, director of the center, the radiation levels are highest ever detected at or around the site.

The Department of Energy states they are still not aware of the cause of the radiation release in underground complex as workers have been unable to get back inside, let alone how radiation managed to get to the surface, if this was a one-time event or an ongoing release.

DOE also indicates operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant will not resume anytime soon and it could three or four weeks before workers can go underground to survey the possible source of the radiation release.

The DOE on Saturday announced it had shuttered operations in response to an underground radiation sensor. But it wasn’t until Wednesday night that DOE confirmed that radiation had also been released above ground, about a half mile from the plant.

Again, it was not until a Thursday press conference that Jose Franco, manager of the DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, confirmed publicly that readings from the monitors matched materials from the waste that is stored there, indicating a leak.

Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said he traveled to Carlsbad as soon as he was told Wednesday night that radiation had been picked up by an above ground air sensor. [read the rest, it could affect you]

Hey OzMan, I’m so amazed at the simple utility and easy accessibility of the ROCKET STOVE that I felt driven to share it. It’s a gift!

“Didn’t everyone prep this tech several years ago?” Come on OzMan, that’s not you. New people are coming to awareness of NTE all the time. Aren’t we here to help them? Even an old hand, like me, wasn’t aware of the mighty ROCKET STOVE.

As far as survival goes, I’m with Sabine and others like her that see long term survival as ‘misery on crack’. Here’s my take on that from a few threads back, in case you missed it:

Here’s how it plays out. A brave and resourceful band of survivors has reached the end of the line. You may want to call it the end of time, but who gives a shit? They’re the last of the few widely scattered groups of survivors, but they don’t know it. The last woman gives birth to the last baby. She wraps it in a filthy cloth and hobbles outside to try to find food. She sets the baby aside to scrape a jellyfish off the beach and a Raven plucks the baby’s eyes out.

That’s not for me! Anyway, some humans may survive (but I seriously doubt it) to start this big shit-o-ree all over again. Round two would be just another big game of grab-ass on its way to hell in a hand basket! I can’t imagine a more horrible tragedy. Humans have proven themselves quintessentially unworthy of existence through their overwhelming introduction of unnecessary suffering into the equation of life. I piss on humanity! But I do admire those of us who have risen above it.

Ah, but being able to toast a jellyfish on the way out? Priceless!

Post collapse is going to be miserable enough, not to say insufferably boring. One of the things that scares me the most is how I know I would feel standing before my grandkids completely empty handed. So, when I see a cool idear I’m going to post it here to share. And I don’t give a fat rats hat about fancy ass protocols.

Two radioactive cesium isotopes, cesium-134 and cesium-137, have been detected offshore of Vancouver, British Columbia, researchers said at a news conference. The detected concentrations are much lower than the Canadian safety limit for cesium levels in drinking water, said John Smith, a research scientist at Canada’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

“RE, it’s obvious you didn’t read the THRUST of what i had to say. I did NOT say that you focus on pre-Medici monetary systems. What i did say was that you treat the present monetary system as a continuation of these older systems, totally failing to see the essential break and DISCONTINUITY between what has happened over the last few centuries and the period before. Banking, markets and money in the pre-capitalist age involved a *tiny minority of the population.* And markets were not today’s competitive situations. You take the existence of money, lending,… in ancient societies as if they occupied the same social roles as they do today. They did NOT. They were marginal phenomena, involving largely only the elites and merchants. Social production as a whole was NOT essentially structured, dominated by the market, monetary relations, or anything of the sort till the advent of capitalism. Lots of details can be read at

I read the link, which is basically a conventional Marxist analysis and mostly correct, but incomplete. It doesn’t cover the synergy between the Banking community and the early Markets in London and Amsterdam with the Naval forces and Privateers. Raising capital to put ships to sea to steal from other nations ships which stole from the Aztecs. Letters of Marque were issued, it was basically legalized theft and it continues today in the corporate world.

The fact money wasn’t as widely distributed through the population doesn’t intrinsically change how is it worked at the large level of states like Egypt and Babylon, the Mongol Empire and China. Debt was exchanged, populations impoverished all by basically the same mechanics.

You also had very much the same effects of crashing monetary systems going as far back as Babylon. From Revelation 18:

“10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

11 And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:

12 The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,

13 And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.”

Whoever wrote that passage was obviously describing a monetary system collapse. If you don’t recognize the similarities with what is going on now, you need a new prescription.

The first sentence contains the phrase “Big Newz” and the phrase “Da Fed” is used repeatedly. What do you make of that capitalisation?

It indicates that one should step around such cesspools and avoid them altogether.

Not knocking the inclusion,but why the ‘rocket stove’ clip here on NBL.

They were discussed on NBL many moons ago – before most of the present crew of commenters, maybe before all of them. I even included links to videos on how to make some in my comments. They were small, and even portable. But the recent links are to more durable ones, better suited to the earlier stages of collapse.

Body and lung scans are now being conducted for everyone within 100 miles of the site, yet nuclear proponents insist, as usual, there’e no threat to public health or safely

Depends on what you mean by public safety. If the “public” is the 1%/elite, then of course the extermination of a large portion of the rest is no different from the extermination of other vermin (the word “other” being used advisedly). The purpose of the “body & lung scans” is not clear. If the stuff has entered the body, all they really need after that is a shovel.

We will demand that federal officials share information with the public in real time

Once again, the question is, who really counts as “the public”?

It is highly disturbing that the Department of Energy waited several days before notifying New Mexico state officials about the airborne release.

Not at all. If there were some 1%ers in the area that were worthy of notification, you can bet your sweet little bippy that they had been promptly notified. No so the proles. Not disturbing at all, except to those living in delusion.

because it seems to me that if you are trying to understand, explain, clarify, what money is and how it works, the obvious thing to do is to begin right from the very beginning and it’s simplest elementary form.

Kirk and Eddie,
I like the design and yes why not, this is where people are coming more and more all the time.
Did Eddie mix the fibreglass in, I couldn’t quite tell?
Eddie’s design does not seem to be of the new (?) mass heater types that have a drum over the flue to redirect the exhaust and heat over some embedded area like a seat etc. It looks like it is a rocket stove and bare flue, is that right. It’s cool, just asking.
Kirk are you in NZ?

Note: We have had a few people mentioning problems with registering on the Diner. We are working to repair this problem. Basically stems from a similar problem Guy had with Spammer Registration. We should have it corrected in the next couple of days.

OzMan, I’m from Florida, USA. Wall to wall people with lots of coconuts mixed in.

For the moment we have been relatively unaffected by the harsher effects climate change. However, due to sea level rise, people in flood zones are going to have their flood insurance premiums increased by a whopping amount averaging $1,000 a month. That is ruining real estate values for the upper crust who like to live along the shore. There’s a scramble on to sell, but 99% of them are too late in spite of being warned for years of the upcoming rate hike. So they’re not only in a pickle but are in a rage to boot. Also, having to spend so much on insurance will be reducing the amount of cash they’ll be spreading around for goods and services. This further weakens the Florida economy where the vast majority of workers earn less than $10 per hour.

Not my work. That stove was built by Matt Walker. I’m going to try to build one like it though. One of the better core designs I’ve seen. My secret plan is to have the materials available when the Sunstead convocation happens in April, and make the participants help me. 🙂

OzMan, I’m from Florida, USA. Wall to wall people with lots of coconuts mixed in.

For the moment we have been relatively unaffected by the harsher effects climate change. However, due to sea level rise, people in flood zones are going to have their flood insurance premiums increased by a whopping amount averaging $1,000 a month. That is ruining real estate values for the upper crust who like to live along the shore. There’s a scramble on to sell, but 99% of them are too late in spite of being warned for years of the upcoming rate hike. So they’re not only in a pickle but are in a rage to boot. Also, having to spend so much on insurance will be reducing the amount of cash they’ll be spreading around for goods and services. This further weakens the Florida economy where the vast majority of workers earn less than $10 per hour

@Eddie, the convention you mentioned seems like a very cool thing, something I would like to see. Not only for good ideas but community building.

I want to say here, seeing that others are reporting problems, that I have problems almost every time I try to post. I always make a copy before I try and this allows me to try the 3 or 4 tries it usually takes to get my posts on board.

Eddie
Thanks for that.
I like the design too.
i may attempt to do something similar too, but add a water coil to heat some water – embed a coil on the heat pipe. May work.
Kirk
yes sea level rise will be a big sign of something not in the programming, but will several gens of mobile screen locked faces see the sea level rise of only news reports of the defiant responses to ‘deadly nature’, by sea-walling etc.
This is typical ego shuffling and denial stratagems. Obfuscation, denial, and creating a shadow force, like Nature – code for the life force intermingled with assumed ‘solid’ atomic mystery – which can be framed as threatening the said Ego activity.
just sayin.
Let us all know how any experiments with stoves etc go, please?

“@Eddie, the convention you mentioned seems like a very cool thing, something I would like to see. Not only for good ideas but community building.”

You will see it for sure, because the Techmeisters of the Diner will all be there. 🙂

We will be recording everything as well as doing Livestreams and Virtual Meetings with anyone from anywhere on the Globe with an Internet Connection to join in with us and hash out ideas for at least Delaying if not Avoiding going Extinct in the long run.

I personally have upped my Hardware to be able to do this all in Full Stereo and HD Video. 🙂

This will not be our only Broadcast this year either. We will be showing up at the Age of Limits Conference in May to Broadcast that one also from the Doomstead Diner Tents. 🙂 They have crappy cell phone coverage there, but if I gotta rent Satellite Equipment, I’ll do that too.

Hope to see some of you Batters online with us during these events. If you are running a Laptop with a Camera & Mic aboard, you should be able to participate.

This ability will not last forever folks, my estimation is the Internet in such form goes south inside the next 5 years. Time runs short, so if you are going to network up this way with others of like minds, the time to do it is NOW.

“I can think of nothing more misleading and underhanded and unpleasant than faux optimism in the face of fatal danger. It is the worst variety of vapid denialism. A noisy annoying distraction from appropriate and timely, mature introspection. Its time to clear the smoke and break the mirrors and take a good look at ourselves… while we still can.

The monkeys are too smart to bother with all this crap. Too smart to have pooped such poop…”

That’s an interesting conjunction of images. I agree, but IMO danger is still relatively distant if there is time for mature introspection? One natural response to fatal danger in your face is to literally shit yourself, about which, afaik, the monkeys have no taboos or inhibitions.. 🙂

” I can think of nothing more misleading and underhanded and unpleasant than faux optimism in the face of fatal danger. It is the worst variety of vapid denialism”-LS

I missed reading this comment originally.

The statement is predicated on all sorts of assumptions. First, expecting and predicting a huge knockdown of human population with all the concommitant War, Famine, Pestilence and Death can hardly be called “optimism”, except by somebody who thinks it will be WORSE than that.

Besides that you make the assumption again that NTHE is a CERTAINTY, which it is not. The very best you could do is assign a probability curve to it and say the total number of survivors diminishes as time goes by here, by 2050 there is a 50% chance of survival, by 2100 a 10% chance etc. It is not “vapid denialism” to look at statistical probabilities of Death vs Survival. Sorry to disappoint you.

I cannot speak for Logspirit, but I assumed he was talking about ‘mainstream denialism’- the kind of denialism that doesn’t find it’s way anywhere near a place like NBL comments? The kind of denialism that doesn’t know, or want to know, that these conversations exist. Presumably even you, RE, the ‘Pangloss of NBL’, are expecting, or at least aware of the possibility of a ‘huge knockdown of human population’ ? That IMO puts you beyond the pale of ‘mainstream denialism’..

..Just thinking out loud, with no intention of calling anyone’s ‘position’ into question..

Experts believe that in order to avoid the worst of a future climate change catastrophe, most of the planet’s fossil fuels must be left in the ground. Ecuador’s ambitious Yasuni-ITT Initiative, launched in 2007, was hailed as a landmark plan to keep oil exploration out of the country’s most pristine forest and to preserve the homes of indigenous tribes living there. ButEcuador abandoned the plan last year, and drilling could now begin any time.

Leila Salazar of the U.S.-based NGO Amazon Watch equates oil exploration in Ecuador’s rainforests with “ignoring a ticking time bomb for the entire planet.” But the once global struggle to secure the Yasuni-ITT Initiative has now largely fallen on the shoulders of a few indigenous tribal communities who have pledged to fight, some to the death, to keep oil companies out of their communities and their oil in the ground.

RE: fact is, the vast majorities of the populations of ancient Egypt, Babylon,…. right into medieval times, had nothing to do with the money system, they directly produced their means of subsistence. To leave that out and continue to assert that money is money period is to ignore this fundamental reality. And no, Meiksins-Wood’s analysis is NOT “standard Marxist” fare, many if not most who call themselves “Marxists” (Marx refused the term, by the way) accept the standard mainstream tripe that capitalism grew out of urban trade centers, which she showed to be fundamentally wrong. Marx in his writings on money demonstrated well how money and markets, though pre-dating capitalism, changed in a basic way upon the rise of capitalism, which incorporated them and altered them to its own needs, not to mention universalizing them, making the entire population dependent upon money and market interactions for survival. What you are doing is nothing less than naturalizing capitalist social relations, i.e. try to make them to be aspects of human nature.

ulvfugl: Yes, very telling that Graeber didn’t answer that question.
And after all the ravings about how the upsurge in Ukraine is entirely the work of “fascists.” here comes Russian extreme fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who today showed up in Sevastopol, Crimea, calling for annexation of that region by Russia. Zhirinovsky has been outspoken over the last 20 years or more, making numerous anti-semitic, anti-gay, anti-Muslim comments. This as forces which may be Russian troops occupied two airports in Crimea.http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/28/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSBREA1Q1E820140228

“I cannot speak for Logspirit, but I assumed he was talking about ‘mainstream denialism’- the kind of denialism that doesn’t find it’s way anywhere near a place like NBL comments? The kind of denialism that doesn’t know, or want to know, that these conversations exist. Presumably even you, RE, the ‘Pangloss of NBL’, are expecting, or at least aware of the possibility of a ‘huge knockdown of human population’ ? That IMO puts you beyond the pale of ‘mainstream denialism’..

..Just thinking out loud, with no intention of calling anyone’s ‘position’ into question..” 180K

From subtext based on what has gone on before here, my position that NTHE is Unlikely but a large NTPK (Near Term Population Knockdown) is Likely has been subject to derision as unrealistic Hopium. Also subject to derision has been the idea that there is anything you as an individual can do to possibly survive, and advocating for this idea is wrong on a moral level. Basically here, because I think probably 90% of the Population will die in the Near Term but not 100%, this is unrealistically Optimistic. That was the context in which I took LS’ statement. If I am making a wrong assumption on that, I apologize.

Should I pursue a path so twisted?Should I crawl defeated and gifted?Should I go the length of a river,The Royal, the Throne, the CRIMEA RIVERWhat about it, what about it, what about it?Oh, I’m pissing in a river.